and proud! I was proving everyone wrong. I was already nearly an hour north from where I started, and traffic was heavy so I assumed that I’d have a ride again in no time. While hitching, I wore no watch and leſt my phone off, so it’s


hard to say how much time passed during any specific part of the journey. But I’m prety sure I was stuck in Brandon for well over an hour. Almost everybody stared. Some went above and beyond,


glaring, giving me the finger, tauntingly revving their engines, and the like. At first, it was amusing to me. I was too invigorated to care.


As far as I was concerned, I had made it out of the cave and these frightened numbskulls were still worshipping shadows. Of course they’d find me amusing or offensive. I walked back and forth over the same 30-yard stretch of


sidewalk. I sang. I danced. Out of boredom, I repeatedly took my pack off just to put it back on again minutes later.


A


round the time I got tired of singing “When I’m 64” (which doesn’t usually happen), I became discouraged. Car aſter car aſter staggeringly unsympathetic car passed by. I started to feel


desperate, cursing and pleading under my breath. I couldn’t understand why no one was stopping. Tey had room in their cars. I was going the same direction as they were. Finally, a young man named Tim pulled over. Tim was a nice


guy. We drove together for about 20 minutes and he dropped me off on the nowhere outskirts of Tampa. It was a bit farther from any town than I would have liked, but I figured it had to be beter than Brandon. Aſter about 20 minutes, it seemed worse. Te exit where Tim dropped me saw a modest fraction of the


traffic in Brandon. Moreover, most of the people who did pass the exit seemed like the sort of quiet old folks who retired in Florida’s gulf side so they could get away from obnoxious young people like me. Most of them didn’t even acknowledge I was there. Again, something vaguely resembling an hour passed by. I tried really hard to stay optimistic. Aſter all, one of the


hypotheses I was testing was whether positive energy was self- manifesting. I couldn’t let fear bloom into pessimism. Tat could compromise everything in a very real way. But the sun was seting and it was geting colder (that


week, Florida nights had been hovering in the 40s). I started to feel scared. I started to doubt myself, started to wonder what the hell I was thinking. How the hell did I get myself into this situation? I started looking at the nearby overpass and seriously wondering whether I could handle sleeping under it—whether it would even be safe. A quiet tide of panic slowly flooded the shores of my


28 Eastern | SPRING 2013


perception. I started wondering whether I should begin walking toward the nearest town. The dilemma I faced was that though I wanted to believe in Fate, I didn’t know what it would want me to do. Was I where I needed to be? Was I supposed to trust in the Universe to send me another guardian? Or was the Universe waiting for me to take myself someplace else? Terein laid the stark philosophical divide between passive and aggressive existence, which was central to my experiment. But there was no logical answer. Both options seemed


perfectly sensible. Tinking was useless. It was a mater of quieting the scatered dissenting intraspiritual voices in search of that faint whisper of truth, and a mater of trusting myself to know it when I heard it. Indecision. I heard my arrogant voice of self-determination, compelling


me to take Fate into my own hands. I felt I was too good, my life too short, to waste any more time lonesome and shivering on the side of the road. So, gauging my direction by the seting sun, I started walking roughly northeast. I didn’t know where I was going but I figured no mater where


I ended up, it’d be beter than where I’d spent the previous hour. I hadn’t walked but a quarter mile when I heard someone


honking at me from behind. I turned to see a woman in an SUV pulling to the curb and waving me over.


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